The publishing History of Ainsworth's Rookwood, A Romance and the Cruikshank illustrations — a bibliographical note

I see how Ruin, with palsied hand
Begins to shake our ancient house to dust.
Yorkshire Tragedy.
— from the 1878 and earlier title-pages.

In 1831, twenty-six-year-old William Harrison Ainsworth, an amateur
dramatist and practising attorney, transformed Cuckfield Place, Sussex, owned by his
friend William Sergison, into gloomy Rookwood Place for his first mature novel after the
minor gothic work Sir John Chiverton (1826). Published in three
volumes by Richard Bentley in April, 1834, with a full program of illustration by George
Cruikshank added in the fourth edition, Rookwood. A Romance
went through five large editions in only three years, making Ainsworth's name and
fortune, and leading directly to his having sufficient literary gravitas to assume the
post of editor of Bentley's Miscellany (1837) when his
protegé, twenty-five-year-old Charles Dickens, quarrelling over his
contract with the publisher, resigned the post in 1838.

First published by Richard Bentley asa triple-decker in 1834, Rookwood became a single-volume when publisher John Macrone (1809-37)
acquired the rights, but a chronic cash shortage subsequently compelled Macrone to sell
his rights to the Ainsworth novels Rookwood and Crichton (1837) back to Bentley. Despite its convoluted plot, the
book is memorable for its handling of atmosphere and its anglicizing the gothic of Anne
Radcliffe, and for its introducing an entirely English element as the insertion of
highwayman Dick Turpin into the inheritance plot helped to establish the Newgate novel of
the 1830s.

Although published in three volumes by Richard Bentley in April, 1834, with a few
illustrations by Daniel Maclise,
the novel's fourth edition was the first that contained a full program of illustration, a
dozen engravings on copper plate, including George Cruikshank's atmospheric rendering of
the setting, The Old Manse, otherwise, Rookwood Place, a
seventeenth-century Yorkshire mansion, viewed through an archway of lime trees that
suggests the long vista of a century, for the action occurs in 1737.
Sir John Gilbert's 1852
wood-engravings, although much more realistic, lack the lightness and vivacity of
George Cruikshank's copper engravings of 1836.